WINNER OF THE JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS AWARD FOR 2009

This monograph describes the establishment of the hypothesis that Charles Darwin’s “natural selection,” reformulated by R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and S. Wright in the light of Mendelian genetics, is the primary or exclusive mechanism for biological evolution. During the 1930s, alternatives such as Lamarchism, macromutations, and orthogenesis were rejected in favor of natural selection acting on small mutations, but there were disagreement about the role of random genetic drift in evolution. By the 1950s, research by T. Dobzhansky, E. B. Ford, and others persuaded leading evolutionists that natural selection was so powerful that drift was generally unimportant. This conclusion was accepted by most; however, a significant minority of biology textbooks and popular articles mentioned drift in the late 1960s.

Stephen G. Brush was employed as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (1959–1965), a staff member at Harvard Project Physics (1965–1968, developing a historically oriented physics course for high schools), and Lecturer in Physics and History of Science at Harvard University (1966–1968). From 1968 through 2006 he served on the faculty of the University of Maryland, University Park, with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Institute for Physical Science & Technology. He retired in 2006 and holds the title Distinguished University Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus.

This volume arises from a symposium held in Philadelphia in October 2004. Scholars convened to focus on the “synthesis” period in evolutionary studies, when fundamental changes occurred in the discipline. How does recent scholarship change our understanding of the period? How does it alter our sense of connection across the generations? How do activities in evolutionary studies relate with developments elsewhere in biology? The papers presented at the conference both informed an assessment of the state of the history of evolutionary studies and pressed it forward with new and thoughtful scholarship. Collectively, the papers selected for inclusion in the book make a significant, and occasionally provocative, contribution to their field. Descended from Darwin has been a labor of devotion for Drs. Joe Cain and Michael Ruse. They make all the collaborators’ voices cohere in a unified and logical fashion.

As APS Librarian Martin Levitt writes in the book’s preface, “These are times when historians, so accustomed to looking ever back into the past, are tempted to pause in their pursuits, turn around, and stare hard into the future. This volume, in its thoughtful analysis of the history of understanding of some of the most the fundamental questions of biology, may well have the reader pondering not just the past, but things to come.”

In 1798 Marie-Louise-Sophie de Grouchy, the former Marquise de Condorcet, published her translation into French of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Her translation appeared in two volumes, and she appended eight Letters on Sympathy (lettres sur la sympathie) to the second volume. Karin Brown presents a critical edition of the letters; translation of the letters is provided James E. McClellan. Both show why these letters are of interest and why they, and their author, merit a wider audience in English. The book captures de Grouchy's originality, not only in comparing her to Adam Smith, but also in seeing her as someone who foreshadowed contemporary feminist ethics in powerful and surprising ways.

Karin Brown brings to light this important philosophical text from the end of the Eighteenth Century which will be valuable to scholars of the French Enlightenment, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Women’s Studies, and the history of women in philosophy.

James McClellan’s high quality English translation of de Grouchy’s work makes the Lettres available to a wider scholarly audience. Both Brown’s critical introduction and McClellan’s translation succeed in restoring Sophie de Grouchy’s text to its rightful place in the history of philosophy and ideas.

Deidre Dawson, Professor
Residential College in the Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

WINNER OF THE JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS AWARD FOR 2008

The papers of William Shedrick Willis (1921–1983), housed at the American Philosophical Society, include his drafts of the manuscript Boas Goes to Atlanta. In typescript with handwritten editing and numerous versions, these pages contain the fascinating story of Franz Boas’s visit to Atlanta University in 1906, and more, because Willis intended the work to be a book on Boas’s work in black anthropology. Rosemary Zumwalt focuses on what was to have been Willis’s first chapter, “Boas Goes to Atlanta.” Drawing from archival correspondence and bibliographic research, she expands the sections on Boas’s trip to Atlanta, the time he spent on the campus of Atlanta University, the reaction to his talk by blacks and whites, and the conflict between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington as this related to the trip to Atlanta.

Dr. Zumwalt came to know Willis well through his handwriting, his finely penned notes, and the piquancy of his thoughts. She came to know him better as she read through the correspondence on file at the APS and read of his encounters with racism on a painfully personal level and on enduringly institutional levels. The opening chapter, “Willis: An Introduction,” is precisely that—an introduction to a remarkable man who loved anthropology, and who suffered from the narrowness of those who held the keys of power.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt is the Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of the College, and Professor of Anthropology, at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. She is the author of Wealth and Rebellion: Elsie Clews Parsons, Anthropologist and Folklorist (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988, reprinted 1995).